Just more of the same

This was a short week for Mike and I: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We ended up fitting 27 hours of stone-work into those three days (we need at least 25hrs/wk to earn our food stipend, and doing just the bare minimum would embarrass fellows like us). On Friday, Mike headed up to NY for a long Easter weekend with his folks, and he dropped me off along the way in Virginia to spend a weekend with Margaret's family and friends.

Needless to say, by the end of Thursday's session we relied on beer and the Rolling Stones to help us build the vertical rock puzzle at a worthy pace. My back wanted this four-day weekend just as much as nephew Ian wishes my nipples would squirt milk when he pincer-grips them with wide eyes.

Below you'll notice how strangely some of the rocks are shaped.


It takes time to build these challenged shapes up into level courses, but will you just look at that bubble?


The wall is definitely looking good. Well, part of it looks bad. Ugly. But that is the part that will live below final-grade, and never be seen. It all feels really good. I'm very proud of this creation. Mike and I do a good job walking atop it often, stomping like madmen, chanting and panting, to make sure the rocks are going to be there for 500 years. It wouldn't surprise me if he urinates on it when I'm away, as a kind of acid test.


We have about two more weeks before the workshop, and much to accomplish: finish the foundation, gather materials, organize the schedule, clear campsites for people, prepare lectures, etc... It's going to be an exciting fortnight.

Below is the Rumford fireplace in action. I spent a good 3 hours just sitting in front of it alone, mesmerized by the colors and sounds, and welcoming the heat into my torso. Near the end of the gig, I couldn't resist turning a lonely apple into a late-night treat by throwing it into the fire wrapped in foil, and then dressing it with butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar.


In Virginia this weekend, I took the opportunity to jump in Margaret's mother's pottery studio. The pots I had made last time had since been bisque-fired (the initial firing), and were ready for the next step. And so I glazed, and with a whole new theory. I hope they turn out well, but I'll have to wait until my next visit to find out. I can't extend enough thanks to Betsy for her gift of studio, supplies, time, mind, and clay!

dry, on the rocks.

Every stone must be

Collected. Organized. Lifted. Memorized. Stacked. Stood upon. Pressed upon. Scrutinized. Dropped. Picked up. Placed. No. Dropped. Picked up. Placed. No. Dropped. Lifted. Maneuvered. Ball-bustingly heaved. Placed. Not quite. Shaped. Chiseled. Smashed. Massaged. Spoken to. One more time. YES!

Such is the way of the (modified) dry-stack stone foundation. I say modified, because we are using a sand/clay mortar. We aren't slopping it on like cake decorators, though, we're just using it to fill in gaps in the wall through which drafts or mice could potentially enter the house. It's still a rock-on-rock situation.

My help is here. His name is Mike. He's a white skinny guy with glasses and curls, much like myself, but carrot-topped. He's the last real American man. We work well, slow, and quiet. Here he is channeling energy into a stone. He'll wiggle it, tickle it, then walk on it, until it calls him daddy.


The big, rippled rock is the "threshold" (on top of which the door will go). There's no getting in or out of the house without her permission. She's probably 400 pounds, and she's not afraid to look you in the eye and ask for the magic word. If you look close, you can see the sand/clay mortar between the rocks in the middle of the photo.


When Mike had first arrived, we began laying the stone foundation on the actual site. After day 1, a rainy and demoralizing day, we realized we didn't know squat about stone-stacking. So we took down what we had done and began playing around with rocks elsewhere, making test walls, and monuments, and getting a feel for what is solid and pretty.

We have two types of stones: Virginia stones, and local stones. The Virginia stones were shipped in years ago from a historic Virginian house site, and have been used extensively around the farm. There was a small pile left, and I got the go-ahead to use it on my cottage. They are beautiful stones: flat, nice edges, gorgeous colored faces, and bow ties. Our local stones are much different. They are jagged, pointy, randomly complexified, and might take your life from you if you fell on one at the wrong angle. We've been told they might be a type of flint, and probably what the Native Americans in this region used to fashion arrowheads. They're difficult to stack. Here is a test wall made by Mike, using Virginia stones.


Here I am, shaping one of the local stones. It keeps saying "no," and I just keep telling it "yes."

This was a monumental moment: the completion of the first course! It took days, because we used the biggest, heaviest, and most strangely-shaped rocks (the reasons being that this course will not be seen, heavy rocks are good to have on the bottom to spread the load of the walls, and we want our work to get easier and easier).


I was thrilled to again have Jess visit me. We had talked about her coming early last week, but never set a day or time. I was surprised by a Wednesday morning text message along the lines of "I'm in PA, driving south, ETA 7:00 PM." Jess did everything we did: rock-shaping, mortar testing, mortar laying, muscle-flexing, and stone-stacking.


Jess also got a little burnt, because she didn't want to rub clay all over herself.


On Saturday, Jess and I took our weary bodies into town and spent all her money, and none of mine. We bought a white sweet potato and a regular sweet potato at the farmer's market, did a lot of biking, checked out the "really really free market," stopped in a pottery store, and a bookstore, and a thrift store (new shirt), found a playground cove in which to do Yoga, ate our traditional Weaver Street Market meal of bread/hummus and an ice cream pint in the sunny grass, and watched squirrels in the highest and most delicate limbs of the UNC campus trees. Back at the farm, we chopped wood and built a Rumford fireplace, in which we had a blazing fire spitting flames around two tin-foil packages full of sweet potato, onion chunks, and chives (that we harvested earlier in the day from under Jess' butt in a yard).

The god brick sits atop the Rumford, encouraging the army of bricks beneath it to send directional heat out towards the camera, and smoke up towards the moon.


Thanks, Jess. And it's really great to have Mike. I'll be heading back to the site tomorrow, with the intention of putting up another couple courses of stone this week.

SITE UPDATE

Last week, it was Jess who stepped up to the plate and into the mud. This past week, my friend Lena spent her Spring Break with me. I almost feel as though I must have scammed her. I suppose she got the traditional idea of Spring Break half right. Head far south of Syracuse and into the sun. But manual labor all week?


It turns out that Russians are a sturdy and rugged people. I threw her on all kinds of loops getting from the airport to the farm. I tested her will with (unintended) starvation. I even told her we could go hiking on Thursday, and then must have cleverly disguised shoveling gravel into a trench as hiking well enough that she didn't mind, or was too tired to remember our agreement.

In any case, she was an incredible, and much-appreciated volunteer. Just what I needed with the economy the way it is.

We finished digging the drainage trench, down to the nitty-and-very-gritty details. We tested the flow using a hose and real water.


The idea is that the slope of the trench should send any groundwater/rainwater/floodwater around the trench (under the future walls of the house), and out the drainage tail and away from the house. In this way, the drainage trench creates a theoretical "island" of subsoil upon which sits the living space. Think like water.

If there is ever so much water in the ground (such as during a 10,000-year flood) that it starts rising in the trench, it's good to have backup to get it out quick. So immersed in the gravel is a system of corrugated + perforated drain pipe. In Lena's "TRENCH-CAM" shot below, I am checking the slope of the gravel layer before laying in the drain pipe (enough slope is essential for efficient water-removal).



Here, we manufactured a T-connector from two scrap corner pieces, a hacksaw, and duct tape.


After the pipe was in, and pinned in place with rocks, it was just shovel, shovel, dump, and repeat.


At the conclusion of our week, we had filled the trench completely. We covered it with woven plastic grain bags, which will act as a water-permeable membrane (letting water into the trench, and keeping out as much soil/clay/silt as possible, all of which will find their way in eventually and clog the trench over time).


We started filling in the drainage tail with broken chunks of concrete, rocks, and other rubble.


Next week I, alone, will continue with the rubble infill, and will then move onto the stone foundation. This is representative of one of those points that separates boys from men.

You can't take the artist out of the designer.

Lena is the justifiably proud owner of a big, fat SLR camera, and a finger that is trigger-happy. Here are some of the shots she took when she dodged her duties and wandered off site.

Perhaps the most scar-filled life is that of a telephone pole in a college town.


Kaia is the 3.5-year-old daughter of Megan and Tim (owners of Pickards Mountain). She just recently took a pair of scissors into a dark corner and lopped off her curls.

Back at the wheel

It's poor form to build a cottage just for the hell of it. I've designed this little mud lair around the needs of a lady who grows good food and answers to Margaret. She'll creates opportunities for massage out of thin air. In this particular instance, she made an ambiguous claim about the link between sun and skin cancer, with sunscreen in hand. She followed it up with a pouty face and indicated through interpretive dance that her elbows don't bend in a way that allows her to rub her own shoulders. My elbows bend as far as an owl can turn it's head, but hey, I'm my own man.


In the end, Karma worked in my favor, as Margaret offered me a weekend's stay at her parents' house near Richmond, Virginia. Her mother happens to be a potter. She's a twig of a lady, but with enough energy to fill the void between any polar bear and the closest wild banana tree. She got me seated at a wheel, threw me some clay, and let me loose. I made 8 pieces on Saturday (shown below). On Sunday they had dried enough so that I could "tool the foot" of each. I am in eager anticipation of my next chance to visit, so I can glaze and fire.



Mrs. Krome has been a production potter for 34 years! This blue glaze is what people want, sales have indicated.



A snapshot of the family. Mr. Lukens is also a hell of a guy. He imparted upon me all kinds of stories from his youth, from his 3 years living on a sailboat to his time out West, and bits and pieces of what living is all about (namely, having a prize-winning beard).

Why stop here?

I've gotten more than two or three comments in the past week about the level to which I take consumption of an apple. Below are the remains of my midnight snack.


What puzzles me, is that this particular specimen would surely glean comments - "Greg! Geez! Just eat two!" - but I see an almost embarrassingly large amount of fruit still there, staring back at me with it's seedy eyes.

The SITE

I started to write an elaborate post about my travels in the past three weeks, and it drained me before the halfway mark. It's in the works. Here's a quick update on the building site. The mantra continues to be "slow and steady wins the race."


(mid-January...) The site was finally level, so it became time to stake out the shape of the building.


I'm always rubbing clay on my pants, but it doesn't always end up looking better than half the art in the MOMA.


Two considerations that are always on my mind when deciding on my next move are: "am I being trendy?" and "How can I stay in the confines of my 1G budget?" Below, I have the Gator parked on top of an old, abandoned building site. Around the gator is a trench filled with gravel, and drain pipe, much like the drainage trench my building needs. So I spent Inauguration day, and the day after, digging out the gravel and pipe from this trench, and carting it up to my site in the gator. Re-use is both trendy and fiscally sound (in this case to the pretty tune of at least $200 in savings).


Here I am digging the trench, into which the rescued gravel will soon go. This was how I left the trench before taking a fortnight vacation up to NY. "Oh, you should build a little cob castle in the middle, it looks just like a moat!" people tended to comment.


Upon my return from New York, nature had made a similar comment, substituting water for words. Initially, the standing water was about 2 inches from the top edge of the trench. By the time of the photo, my friend Jess and I had created enough of a drainage tail that we had dropped the water level substantially. There was a sense of urgency, because the longer the water sat, the more the trench would erode (we were reminded of the urgency by consistent "plops," the distinct sound of earth eroding and plummeting in the moat).


Here is Jess at the end of the drainage tail, pulling orange mud along the bottom of the trench to allow the water to flow to freedom. This muckraker of a girl was a HUGE help, in lending both her time, companionship, and every ounce of strength she could muster (as well as providing me with the 12-hour car ride back down from NY). Try as I might, I wasn't deft enough to get a photo of her face.


It was a job for bare feet, because I didn't want to ruin my boots. The problem was that the water temperature was close to freezing (it had a cover of ice upon our arrival), so a couple times I had to hobble to the kitchen and heat up water on the stove to bring feeling back to my toes.



After all the water was drained, we spent the rest of the week doing other things (moving earth to appropriate places, making some cob!, and collecting stone for the foundation). The trench was left to dry out, so that tomorrow I can clear out the lose, eroded material. Then it should be ready to fill with gravel (and drainage pipe).

This marks a big step in the building process, the point at which I stop working DOWN into the earth, and start building UP from the earth. My friend, Yelena, from the SU Industrial Design program, should be arriving tomorrow to graciously (and naively?) spend her spring break on my site, helping me.

It feels so good to admit that I can't do it alone.